


Dead Men Walking

by Krasimer



Series: The Longest Roads Stretch Away [4]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Backstory, Canon Related, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, Family, Hidan (Naruto) Swears, Kakuzu's history, M/M, Memories, Running Away
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2020-07-19 06:27:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19969516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krasimer/pseuds/Krasimer
Summary: They were the ones left on the sinking ship -- Kisame and Itachi had been the rats to flee.This has been said before, of course, but it only now occurs to them.When pushed, they will make a break for their own survival. God, Art, Wealth, none of those things are enough to keep a mismatched group together. The Akatsuki must disband for the survival of the members.





	1. Chapter 1

He told himself he didn’t know why he had helped them.

A debt to be repaid, certainly, an old team partner, an older connection he’d done his best to sever. He hadn’t wanted to admit why he’d helped them, hadn’t wanted to even let himself say the real answer inside his own mind. Now they were looking through carefully, trying to find where the weak link in the organization was, and he still felt safe enough to stay. For the time being, at least, in the moment.

If the searching eyes came any closer, he would have to take his own leave.

He had lived through a couple of purges, the destruction of those who had turned traitor before. He had never been involved with their flight, however, had never been the one urging them onward.

If Pein figured out that it was him, Kakuzu would be slaughtered. Konan would step in to perform the task for her partner, would use her paper figures to slice apart the masks on his back and rip out his hearts. His remains would be fed to Zetsu, anything left of him after that would be left to rot, to fade away, to fall to ashes. He stared resolutely down at the papers on the table in front of him, refusing to let his hand go tight on his pencil, refusing to let his ledgers be imperfect as a result of his nerves. He was, actually, very grateful that none of the others had ever seen the pages of them before.

The money he had sent with Kisame and Itachi would have been noticed in a second, if they had.

The candles were burning down around him by the time he finished with his keeping.

He picked up his ledger, closing it carefully and binding it shut once more. He would know if someone had peered into it, had stolen a glance at the pages he kept so close. The bindings ensured that, but he still let himself be near-paranoid about it.

(There were many things he did not let himself think about.)

The reason he had sent Kisame away, had ensured that he and Itachi would be as safe as possible, had given them as much help as he could…

He twitched, cracked his neck almost viciously, clenched his hands into fists.

_No._

He couldn’t let himself think of it, couldn’t let himself even breathe the answer in the quiet of a room. It went against everything they knew of him, everything anyone still living knew of him. His little brother had known him to be different, once, but he had erased the person that man had known. He had wrapped every bit of him up and tossed him into an early grave, had struck out on his own and buried his name and his home and his origins.

But that tiny crack in his heart, the small flaw in his armor, the bit of himself that refused to give up those memories – that was the part of him that had allowed Kisame and Itachi their leave. If he hadn’t had that at his center, he would have left them to the mercies of an organization that wanted them dead.

He had been a big brother, once.

Their parents had been forceful in the directing of their sons, a disgraced nobility that had wanted better for their offspring. He had learned, early on, that stability included money, as much as possible, and being a criminal had paid better than anything else he might have achieved. His brother had been sent almost the opposite way, they had run into each other several times—

Kakuzu closed his eyes, rubbing at the bridge of his nose.

The past was the past.

It was behind him now, covered in dust and hidden away like something pushed to the back of a storage shed. No use in bringing it forth now, not when it would change nothing. He had done what he had done, his brother had done what he had done, their parents would never be able to come back and approve or disapprove of him again.

Taking a quick glance at his coffer, Kakuzu stood and gathered everything into his arms, returning them to their hiding places. If things turned sour, if his life was at stake, he could run. He had the financial ability and the resources.

He could slip into the night, unnoticed, before their leader even realized what was happening.

He had been half-planning it since Kisame had joined, anyway. The Akatsuki’s goals and his own were not as often aligned as he wanted them to be and, while the Akatsuki was somewhat stable, he could feel the ground slipping out from underneath them.

There was a need, deep inside of him, to be as far away from the inevitable explosion as possible.

The longer he let himself sit in the dark, thinking about the fragments of his past that slipped into the fore of his mind, the more miserable he would be. Kakuzu slipped into his bed, laying on his back and waiting for unconsciousness to come to him. After a few minutes of his mind racing, refusing to settle, Kakuzu growled into the darkness, throwing an arm over his eyes.

(‘ _I know you,’_ his brother had said once. ‘ _Despite what you would have others think, you actually do like people.’_

‘ _I despise them,’_ he had told him, just before abandoning him where he was.)

He rolled over onto his side, his jaw clenching tightly as he tried to keep his eyes tightly shut.

In his hardened heart, buried deep, he hoped that Kisame and Itachi were safe. He had seen how they’d been sleeping, when he went to rouse them. Curled so tightly together that there wasn’t a hair’s width of air between them. In an organization where personal stories were held tightly, secrets kept with every breath, he couldn’t be sure when their relationship had shifted from protective but impersonal to something more intimate.

His suspicion, however, was that it had happened while they had been on the trail of the Jinchuuriki. Itachi had been too young, before, and he knew Kisame well enough to know the man would keep his attraction to someone, if he had even realized it, to himself.

Itachi would have had to be the instigator.

Groaning as he realized he was still not sleeping, Kakuzu sat up in his bed. Something still didn’t feel right.

Out in the hallway, he heard footsteps suddenly getting closer to his room. The door swung open, nearly slamming into the wall before he caught a glimpse of a pale hand scrabbling for the end of it, keeping it from doing so. The door was shut again, silently as it could be, and the light was blocked out once more.

The quiet swearing he could hear, however, told him that his partner had just entered his room.

Ordinarily, partners shared a room, but he had shown a preference for his own room. Several times. Usually by slaughtering the offender of his personal space and leaving their corpse for someone else to clean up.

Hidan stood in near-silence for a moment, seeming to catch his breath. “Fucker, where the fuck are your candles?” he moved in the darkness and Kakuzu heard him catch his foot on the trunk by the door. He may be something of a masochist, but he hated the stubborn pain that came from a nerve being hit. Instead of answering him, Kakuzu reached over and lit the candle at his bedside, shielding it slightly as the wick caught. Hidan had a bloody trail down one side of his face, several razor-thin stripes just narrowly avoiding his left eye.

From his kneeling position next to Kakuzu’s bed, Hidan looked up at him, his left eye narrowed to avoid pulling the skin. “Konan attacked me.” He seemed to search Kakuzu’s face. “Sasori came back to base a week ago, reporting a failure on his part – he couldn’t capture the Jinchuuriki. Something about having been stopped by a _certain_ pair of people.”

Ah.

Kakuzu took a deep breath. “Grab everything out of that trunk,” he gestured towards the one Hidan had slammed into. “They’re purging all possible information leaks. Anyone who _might_ be giving information to those who have abandoned the cause.”

“I’m an _immortal,_ ” Hidan scoffed, still following Kakuzu’s order. “What the fuck are they going to be able to do to me?”

“Bury you in concrete?” Kakuzu stood up, pushing his bedcovers back and away. “Pull you apart, piece by piece, and bury your pieces all across the world? I’m sure they would think of something.” He pulled a bag from another trunk, tossing it onto the bed. He had lived on his own before, had survived in the wilds.

He could do it again.

Hidan watched him for a moment, his eyes glittering in the candlelight. “What?”

“They have done this before,” Kakuzu pulled on a couple of shirts, followed by his heaviest coat. One of his first rules for when he had to run – wear his clothes. They took less room that way. “I have survived several purges.”

“But this time you helped them,” Hidan stared at him, putting the pieces together. “The night you took my watch shift.”

“Yes.” Kakuzu slid his shoes back on, tapping each toe on the ground to settle his feet into them. “I have been half-prepared for this since I joined and found out it was something occasionally done. They will not wait for innocence to be proven – they will slaughter you for the slightest perceived betrayal.” He moved around the bed, sliding his ledgers and papers into the bag, followed by the envelopes holding his money. All total, he had enough to run as far as he needed to, further if necessary, and set up a new life somewhere else. “If we’re lucky,” he paused, considering his partner.

They had fought so often, but even Hidan didn’t deserve to be ripped apart for the slightest role he had unknowingly played.

“If we’re lucky,” he said again. “Deidara will cause a distraction. If they go after him, then he may very well aid us in getting out unnoticed.”

“…Us?”

Kakuzu narrowed his eyes at him. “Do you plan on living for however long you live as a scattered body, concrete poured over you and your mouth filled?”

Hidan stood up slowly, his mouth open as if he were about to argue.

The faint scratching of paper against stone and wood, however, stopped him from saying anything. One of Konan’s scouts managed to slide under the door and into the room. Before it could slip away again, Kakuzu tossed the still-lit candle to the ground, catching the edge of it and setting it ablaze. “We run,” he told Hidan. “Or we die.”

“Fuck it,” Hidan said after a moment. “Good a plan as any.”

Taking his hand, Kakuzu led the way through the darkness. “There is no time to grab anything else,” he told Hidan. “So I hope you have everything you need or want.”

There was no chance for Hidan to respond as an attack came rushing at them from the other end of the hall.


	2. The Rising Tide

They were both in the room when it happened.

Deidara was sitting on his bed, his hair pulled down from his ponytail, barefooted and curled in an odd position as he read, drawing something on the pages every once in a while. When the noises grew louder, too loud, his head snapped up like a predator tracking prey. His eyes were pinned on the door, wide as he cocked his head to one side and listened.

After a minute, he turned to Sasori, watching the puppet master set down one of his carving tools.

The noise of Konan’s attacks was, while rare, noticeable.

Sasori turned to him, eyes wide, and Deidara closed his book, sliding off of his bed as quietly as he could. He had heard a silence like this before – before he had left his village, he had been aware of someone coming to kill him. The house had been silent except for the occasional whisper of cloth.

That had ended with Iwagakure in flames.

He knew his appearance was deceiving. People would look at him and see a teenager with too much hair, longer than it should be, and his slight frame and they would think ‘child’. They wouldn’t think ‘threat’. They wouldn’t see how his mind was always churning away inside his head, how he could piece together puzzles well enough.

Not as well as some others, perhaps, but well enough.

With careful steps, he moved to the door and put his ear against it. The thud of footsteps against the stone floor outside was obvious and echoing in the halls of their hideout. Deidara frowned, leaning a little closer.

Hidan’s voice was also an obvious thing.

Sasori was beside him the moment he heard the voice, a hand on the door. He met his eyes, brown meeting blue, and he nodded. “Kakuzu has been a part of this organization for some time. He has told me, before, about the purges they do when they think that there is a non-loyal member in the group. None but the most loyal are spared.”

“Hm,” Deidara glanced back towards the door. For a moment, he seemed to be considering something. “So you’ve been expecting something like this?”

“Not exactly.”

“But you knew it was a possibility.”

“Yes.”

“Yeah,” Deidara moved away from the door, shoving his feet into his sandals as he went. “I’m leaving.” He dropped back onto his bed, reaching under it and yanking a couple of times on something until it came free. Once it was in his hands, Sasori raised an eyebrow at him, watching him open the bag he had just pulled from the crack between the bolted-down bed and the stone wall. He noticed Sasori watching and shrugged a shoulder. “What?”

“Just like that,” Sasori gestured at the bag. “ _Just like that._ You’re ready to go, packed and everything.”

“Sasori,” Deidara huffed out a laugh, unamused. “I’ve been running my entire life, yeah. I ran from my home, I ran away from what I knew was going to be a shitty situation there, ran away from it and left it in flames after what I did.” He grinned. “If you think that the Akatsuki recruiting me changed anything about my ability to run, you’re wrong, yeah.”

He nudged something aside in the bag and stuck the book he had been reading in it. “If anyone else is smart enough, they’re already packed to go too.”

“What, you didn’t trust them enough?”

“Why the fuck would I trust them?” Deidara turned on him, his bag slung across his back as he moved towards where he kept his bags of clay. “An organization of S class criminals who got to where they were, recruited and all, because they did something disloyal enough to get a rep, yeah?”

“I—” Sasori blinked a couple of times, then frowned.

“If the stories are to be believed, you killed a couple of the leaders of your village,” Deidara flicked a finger towards his puppets. “Kakuzu—I don’t even know what he did, actually. But Kisame killed the leader of his village, Itachi slaughtered his entire clan, I killed a lot of people. Hidan is a murderous priest of a psychotic religion – Zetsu eats people _who piss him off_ , yeah.” His nose wrinkled. “I don’t trust any of you fuckers as far as I could throw you, Danna.”

“So you’ve been ready to run at a moment’s notice, all this time,” Sasori looked at his puppets, then back at Deidara.

“And if you try to stop me,” Deidara pulled a handful of clay out of the bag he’d just strapped to his waist. “Then I will fight back.”

Sasori watched him, studying his face for a couple of minutes, then nodded. “Then go. We’ve never gotten along, not once, but if you feel like you need to go, then go.” He moved to the side, clearing the pathway to the door. “I’m not going to stop you.” He watched as Deidara put the clay back in his bag, seeing only half of it go in. The other half was likely already in his hand, being formed into explosives.

“We’ve never gotten along,” Deidara took a couple of steps closer, hesitating at the door. “But I’ve trusted you to watch my back.”

With that, he was gone through the door in a moment, his hair still down and whipping out behind him as he went. Sasori stared at the path he had taken, the now-empty hall, before he turned back to his puppets. “Fuck,” he told them quietly. “I—Fuck.”

Glancing out the door, he pushed it almost closed, gathering his puppets, the scrolls holding them, and shoved everything into a bag. If this was a purge like the ones Kakuzu had told him about before, then they were all at risk. Even though he was the one who had reported Itachi and Kisame as possibly not being loyal before, as the ones who had kept him from completing his own mission, he was still in danger if they decided he was too much of a liability.

The risks had been worth it, before.

Now, with the organization falling apart, Kisame and Itachi the rats fleeing the sinking ship, nothing was worth the risk of being decommissioned in the worst and most permanent way.

If he was to continue with his immortality, he would need to flee as well.

As he drew the bag closed, packing it, he spared a thought for his grandmother. For his distant cousins. The youngest was the Kazekage, now, and he knew none of them likely knew he existed. Or if they did, they knew of him in terms of how dangerous he was, what he had done to their village before they were born. He hesitated over the scrolls sealing the two previous Kazekages, holding them in his hands and staring down at them.

If…

Running away might mean needing anonymity.

He could always make himself a new body, could also transfer his core into a new shell. His body could be hidden, could be sealed away in a scroll until the world forgot who he was. For all that he was immortal, he could easily make his past die.

His puppets, his instruments, his art, all of it could give him away.

After a moment, he tucked them into his bag anyway. If he left them behind and his disappearance was discovered, they would likely just be destroyed.

Slinging the bag over his shoulder, Sasori turned to the doorway, stopping dead in his tracks. The door made noise when it opened, one of the few things he and Deidara had agreed upon when it came to a shared space. Noise made it harder for someone to sneak into their room.

But when he turned, the newest recruit of the Akatsuki was standing there.

A man only referred to as Tobi, who constantly wore an orange mask that only allowed for one eye to see through the hole in the front. A good bet, a _smart_ bet, was that he only had one eye remaining after whatever he had gone through. The bulky sweater and gloves he always wore under his cloak, even on the hottest days, did next to nothing to hide his sometimes awkward movements, the broken way his joints clicked and popped when he moved. He was Zetsu’s partner, for the moment, which had surprised everyone.

Zetsu was known for turning practically feral and ripping them to shreds within a few hours.

Until recently, when Tobi had joined up, he had been banned from having a partner.

“Do you think,” he took a slow, menacing step forward. “That you can just pack up and leave?” he took another step, leaving Sasori feeling penned in. Trapped. Normally, when Tobi spoke, he sounded childish. Young, stupid, maybe a little slow.

The voice coming from him now was enough to make Sasori panic.

He hadn’t underestimated someone this badly in a long, long time. His hand clenched a little tighter on the strap of his bag, his hip brushing the desk he had been sitting at not long ago. Out in the hallway, the door still open, he could hear Hidan yelling.

He wondered if Kakuzu was awake and aware of the purge that was in progress.

He hoped Deidara had made it out.

For all that there were no friends in the Akatsuki, secrets kept close to the chest and nothing connecting them beyond mismatched ambitions, he was somewhat fond of those two. He and Deidara would fight, would squabble and quibble and scream until the sun burned out about what art really was, but he was fond of the blond psychopath.

Kakuzu was just someone good to have on your side.

Tobi took another step forward. He was unarmed, by all appearances – no weapon in his hand, no pouch of kunai and shuriken on his hip or thigh. There was nothing strapped to his back. There was something familiar about the way he held himself, however, that gave Sasori pause.

The tilt of his head, the deceivingly calm way he spoke…

It reminded him of Itachi.

Just as that thought occurred to him, Tobi took one last step forward, his visible eye going a deep, bloody red. Having worked alongside Itachi for six years, Sasori could recognize a Sharingan when he saw one. “What—”

“I said,” Tobi repeated. “Do you think that you can pack up and _leave?_ ”

His left hand clenched into a fist, drawing Sasori’s focus for a moment. “There are things happening, orders being carried out, plans set in _motion_ ,” he raised his right hand to Sasori’s chin, clenching his jaw tightly. He was a long-range fighter, usually from inside Hiruko – up-close assaults were not his strength. He had hesitated too long, had stayed unaware for just a second too much, and now he was going to pay for it.

He could reach for his weapons, his poisons, but they were in the bag on his back.

Whatever Tobi was going to do to him would be faster than he could reach them. He was going to die.

“You do not get to leave here alive,” Tobi continued, his eye narrowing behind his mask. His hand clutched a little tighter and Sasori could hear his body creaking, weakening, under his grasp. He was old enough that he should have known, experienced enough that he _should have known._ “You do not get to leave here and spread the story to the world. I want people unaware when my changes unfold.”

A quiet noise made him pause, tilting his head.

“Oh? Something you have planned?” Tobi scoffed and Sasori could almost hear the smirk on his face. “You don’t—”

“Sasori!”

Both of them turned, Tobi’s hand going a little looser as he angled himself away. Blond hair flashed in the dim lighting of the room, followed by a quiet splat of clay against a hard surface. Tobi reeled back, already steadying himself as Deidara put his hands together in almost the same moment the clay hit.

_“KATSU!”_

Sasori managed, only just, to reel back and hit the ground as the explosion sounded, Tobi frantically clawing his mask off of his face. With a snarl, Deidara lunged into the room one last time, grabbing Sasori’s hand in both of his own and pulling as hard as he could. “You are _useless_ in close quarters, yeah!”

He just barely managed to get a glimpse of a scarred face that looked a lot like Itachi’s before both of them took off running, not even bothering to be quiet.

Watching the blond man as they moved out and away together, Sasori stared at him, trying to wrestle with his confusion. “I thought you didn’t trust any of us – you literally said that, not ten minutes ago!”

“I don’t trust them,” Deidara growled the words out. “But you? You’ve kept me alive during complicated missions. I don’t know if I trust you, yeah. I do know that you never took the opportunity to kill me in my sleep or when I was injured.” He glanced over at Sasori, his hair flashing out like a banner behind him, still down from his usual ponytail. “Gotta be worth something, Danna.”

Without any warning, he came to a stumbling halt, throwing out an arm to stop Sasori as well. “Stay here.” He turned on his heel, back towards the hideout. “We don’t want them following us, yeah.”

“Us?”

Deidara gestured off to the side – now that his attention was brought to them, he could see Kakuzu and Hidan sitting on the ground. Hidan’s face was bleeding sluggishly and Kakuzu’s shoulder looked like someone had taken a large blade to it several times. Both of them were staring at Deidara like they thought he’d gone insane, though Hidan seemed to be slightly concussed.

“Hold on to your heads, yeah.” Deidara braced himself against the ground, anchoring himself as best he could, before putting his hands together.

Sasori could suddenly see the large clay figures standing at the opening of the hideout, both taller than Kakuzu and twice as wide at the shoulders. For a second, he looked at the insane bomber who had been assigned as his partner and wondered how he had never gotten to know what was going on in his head.

In the next second, the air itself was on fire as his explosions went off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! I! Forgot! To! Tell! AO3! This! Has! Multiple! Chapters!
> 
> I've been awake for Too Long because it's the one shift a week where I work wonky hours! Have a chapter!


	3. Working Alongside

He had never, before now, really considered how little held the Akatsuki together.

He’d been recruited when the rest of his clan had gone off into battle, hadn’t returned home. He had been merely an acolyte at the time, ascended to priesthood with the deaths of his parents and his people, stood as one of four remaining Jashinists. He wore the symbol and bore the marks proudly, held his head up high, considered himself in high standing.

Of an intelligence to be able to fight his way out of most situations.

So it struck him as odd that he had never once considered how little had held the organization he worked for together. The four of them moved together, as fast as they could, through the darkness. They had left the base behind them several hours ago, Hidan thought as he felt Kakuzu adjust his grip on his shoulder, surely they could slow down a little?

“If we’re still close by when they manage to dig themselves out,” Kakuzu growled the words out, glancing at the others. “Immediate retaliation. We’ll be hunted down.”

“Yes, alright,” Sasori took a moment to gather his thoughts, an expression on his face that Hidan recognized from when he’d been about to explode at Deidara about something. Fucker didn’t get loud in an argument often, but when he did, he was louder than the bomber. Crazier, too, enough so that Hidan tried to stay out of his way. None of them trusted each other, he knew that. “So explain _why_ you decided to turn traitor on them?” he gestured back the way they had come, his eyes narrowed. A sure sign of his control slipping, his temper reaching the surface. “Because that’s the only thing that makes any sense – someone in this organization had to tell Itachi and Kisame they were under fire, under threat, and it wasn’t myself, nor was it Deidara!”

“I owed them a debt,” Kakuzu’s temper was rising as well, Hidan could tell it was. His partner had a few tells – he’d learned them shortly before some part of him had been sliced off in the early days. “And if your only plan for your life was settling into the Akatsuki’s service and continuing with that for eternity, you’re even more of an idiot than I suspected in the first place, Akasuna.”

Sasori’s upper lip peeled back, baring his teeth in an angry grimace.

With a roll of his eyes that was more of a roll of his head than anything else, Deidara stepped in between them. “Kakuzu did what he had to do, yeah.” He elbowed his partner away, falling into step between them. “Probably like me – trusts the rest of you about as far as he could throw you.”

“Precisely,” Kakuzu nodded, his hand curling around Hidan’s ribs and dragging him up again. Hidan could feel his head lolling to one side, the concussion he knew he had to have after the way his head had rebounded off the wall threatening just at the edge of his mind. When he blinked, there were after images of what he was seeing, like ghosts behind his eyelids. “I could throw most of you a considerable distance. I trust you even less than that. But I do not let my debts go unpaid. A life for a life, equally paid back as it was earned. Kisame saved me and someone else. I saved him and someone else.” He turned to face ahead again. “Debt paid.”

Before Sasori could ask the question Hidan knew had to be about to leave his mouth, Kakuzu shook his head. “Don’t.” he ordered, his odd eyes narrowed as he glanced sidelong at the puppeteer.

“You cannot just tell us something like that and expect us not to _question_ —”

“I can, I will, I am,” Kakuzu turned away from Sasori, fully ignoring him. Hidan groaned, leaning closer to him as his partner supported his mostly-dead-weight.

“Shut the fuck up, Sasori,” Deidara’s smile was bright, his visible eye gleaming in the light of dawn coming over the horizon. “None of us trust each other, yeah. Doesn’t mean we can fight and squabble right now—”

“I will absolutely cause fighting amongst ourselves,” Sasori’s upper lip pulled back, his fists clenching at his sides. Through the blurry vision and the double-seeing, Hidan could see his chakra building up around his fingers, like he was either going to pull out several puppets or he was going to control Kakuzu. “I cannot trust him – he led to our organization falling apart and their attempted slaughter of us!”

“They would have done that _anyway_!” Kakuzu snarled back, his hand clutched so tightly around Hidan’s shoulder that the Jashinist thought he would have bruises in the shapes of his fingers. “The Akatsuki was a sinking ship and you _know_ it!”

“That does not mean you put a hole in the hull of the ship!” Sasori got in Kakuzu’s face, his eyes wide. The madness he normally kept tightly leashed was out in full force and Hidan was too dizzy and nauseous to do much to get in between them. “A sinking ship, Itachi and Kisame the rats that escaped first, but you do not blow a hole in the hull and send us to the bottom of the ocean!” he lunged forward, sending Kakuzu back a step or two. His right fist, balled up and covered in chakra, rose through the air, heading directly for Kakuzu’s face.

It was caught only a few inches from his nose.

“Y’wanna talk about sinking ships, Danna?” Deidara’s snarl was _furious._ “How about we don’t blow apart the lifeboat while we get away from the sinking ship, yeah?”

“ ** _Deidara—_** ”

“NO!” Deidara twisted his partner’s arm, pulling him back and away before laying the puppet master out on the ground. Hidan hadn’t even really seen him move – Sasori was just suddenly _down._ “You’re acting like this isn’t something we should have been expecting, yeah. The Akatsuki was an unstable mixture, a dangerous explosive that would only ever blow off the hands of the people lighting it up, yeah!” he braced his foot against Sasori’s chest, his own chest heaving.

“It could have lasted—”

“Do you _really_ believe that?” Deidara looked distraught, brushing his bangs out of his face. The eyepiece he wore shone in the dawn light, glimmering for a moment before his hair fell back down. When his fingers touched the metal of it, he paused. “None of us go together, Danna. Not a single one of us, yeah.” He reached under his hair, grunting in pain for a moment, before he slid the eyepiece off of his face, tossing it down next to Sasori’s head. “We’re an unstable mixture and we’re gonna explode before we do what we need to do,” he growled, shaking his head. “The Akatsuki was _never_ going to succeed, not the way we were going. Not with the goals we had, not with the management and the secrets being kept from us, yeah!”

Hidan blinked a couple of times as the bomber pulled his ponytail down, sweeping all of his hair back and braiding it quickly. With just a few movements, he looked completely different than he had before.

A quick glance would prove him to be unrecognizable.

Deidara stood up straight. “I got you out alive,” he told the three of them, shouldering his pack a little higher, working some clay out of his hand. “Your job to do the rest, yeah.” He saluted them, pulling his foot from Sasori’s chest as he walked away. A quick moment of his hand sent the small form he’d made out onto the ground, a burst of chakra making it big enough for him to ride. “We’re all dead men walking if we stay too close,” he jerked his chin up, avoiding meeting Sasori’s eyes. “Get out of here, yeah.”

“Deidara—”

The bomber waved off Sasori’s address of him, urging his creation into the sky before his partner could say anything else.

The puppeteer watched as Deidara was reduced to a dark dot in the clouds, his hands clenched in the dirt, digging into the ground like he was trying to tie himself to it. There was nothing stable about the situation, about the look in his eyes.

Hidan wavered, his entire body trembling as he watched what would happen.

“…We’ve worked for nothing,” Sasori whispered. “Empty ideals and no set futures – they tried to _kill us_ ,” he turned back to Kakuzu and Hidan. He had always been one for plans and schedules, Hidan knew. He didn’t like it when things deviated from the plans. He raised his hands, shaking, and looked at his palms. “There was someone new,” he said after a minute. “Toby, supposedly.”

“We knew Toby, he wasn’t exactly brand new,” Kakuzu frowned, Hidan could see it from the way his eyes narrowed.

“No,” Sasori stood up slowly, brushing himself off. “He had an Uchiha eye, like Itachi. When his mask came off, he looked like Itachi as well – there was scarring and he was missing an eye, but he looked like Itachi.” He looked at his hands again, glancing at the sky. “We need to split up,” he nodded after a second. “They won’t be able to find all of us if we do,” he looked at Kakuzu, suddenly drained of all of his insane fury. “Keep yourselves safe.”

He hesitated for a moment longer, then took off into the trees, as away from the Akatsuki hideout as could be.

Feeling his head reel, Hidan looked at Kakuzu. “Any plans?”

“Either we split up or we don’t,” Kakuzu looked back at him, a hand still on his shoulder. “How is your head feeling?”

“Like shit, thanks,” Hidan scoffed. “But I could make it on my own if I had to. It would fucking suck, a pain in the ass, but I’d be okay.” He swayed, unsteady as his head pounded from the volume of his own voice. Kakuzu steadied him with both hands. “What are your plans?”

“Get further away,” Kakuzu looked down at the small device Deidara had pulled off his face, then sighed. He took one of his hands back, pushing his mask down and his headpiece up, pausing to pry his village marker off of it. He tossed the metal into the trees, both of them listening to it ping off of branches and rip through foliage. He reached around Hidan’s neck, undoing the knot of his forehead protector and pulling it off. “Survive.”

He stared down at Hidan for a moment. “Your plans?”

“I think they align with yours,” Hidan stood up a little straighter, his chin held high.

“Then you can come with me,” Kakuzu rolled his eyes. “Just stay out of my way.”

It was a paraphrasing of the way he had introduced himself to Hidan, back when they had first become partners.

Hidan could live with the grumbled acceptance.

They were still partners.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I went away for a while. Life ate me. Work ate me. I'm trying to navigate finding a new job and also a place to live. I'm trying not to live in the tiny city I hate forever.
> 
> Enjoy this. I hope people are still reading.
> 
> (Deidara is angry and was always expecting things to fall apart. So was Kakuzu. Sasori is in denial about the whole thing.)


	4. Knock You Out (Send You Straight To Hell)

The oddest part about traveling away from the Akatsuki base was that now his face was exposed.

He had abandoned his mask and his coverings in a bush a few miles away from where he had pitched his forehead protector. Hidan kept staring at him, occasionally blinking a couple of times. It was as if he was unsure of what he was seeing. “If you keep staring,” Kakuzu muttered, turning to his partner.

“I’m just…” Hidan frowned, looking away again. “I’ve never seen your face this long before.”

“You-”

“It’s weird,” Hidan shrugged. “I didn’t even think about how different emotions would look on your face. Don’t fucking know why, just…Didn’t.” he shrugged, glancing at Kakuzu before staring straight ahead. They had been walking in near silence for several hours, Hidan’s face no longer bleeding. They had only stopped once, to take care of their various injuries from Konan’s attack. The slices in Kakuzu’s shoulder were sore, itching, and painful.

The Jashinist shivered slightly, rubbing at his arms. In the frenzied escape from the Akatsuki base, they had needed to leave several things behind. Hidan did not have much in the way of personal belongings, as far as Kakuzu knew.

He didn’t have any idea what Hidan’s room had looked like, really.

Didn’t even know what he enjoyed. What he read. What he liked and what he hated. Deidara had been right. The Akatsuki had been an unstable mixture of people, a non-homogenized recipe of a disaster waiting to happen. They knew nothing about the people they were supposed to work in teams with, supposed to trust in some manner. The best teams had been Kisame and Itachi, followed by Sasori and Deidara. The two artists had been dysfunctional, even so. As much as they seemed to know each other, Sasori would still lose his temper at the slightest hint of something going off-plan.

They had been a mismatched crew, incapable of working together properly.

They had been a sinking ship.

Their mission would have failed.

Kakuzu let that thought simmer in his mind for a while, turning the words over and over again. He knew next to nothing about Hidan – not what he enjoyed, not what he craved. The only things he knew were that he took his religion seriously and he slaughtered people with a smile on his face. Sacrificed them to his god.

“Here,” he muttered, pulling off a layer. He had managed to slip a few extra shirts in his bag before they had needed to run. The ones he had put on to avoid carrying were blood-stained and torn at the shoulder. Now, with his shoulder bandaged, the risk of blood seeping onto them was minimal. He had paused to pull them on when they had stopped to assess their injuries. Kakuzu held the shirt out to Hidan, watching him narrow his eyes. He couldn’t blame Hidan – he had never been the kindest of people. Had never once offered something freely.

That had been the undoing of the Akatsuki, it seemed. So he would have to strive to do better.

He almost wanted to curse Itachi and Kisame.

The two of them had struck a spark in him, it seemed. Reignited the parts of him that had once been doused. Reminded him of better days. He clenched a fist, watching as Hidan took the shirt and slipped it on. They were headed towards colder lands. The immortal would need new clothes, soon. They had both ditched their cloaks a while back. Hidan’s penchant for going shirtless would be a disaster in some of the places Kakuzu was planning on going.

He still didn’t know why he had helped them.

With a small growl, Kakuzu forced himself to face forward and focus on the path. His thoughts could circle his past all they wanted, he didn’t need to listen to them. Just because his brother was long-dead and could no longer see the changes in him…

He closed his eyes for a moment. That was the thought he had been avoiding.

When he opened his eyes again, Hidan was looking at him, his head tilted. “I…” the immortal frowned, nodded, looked away. “The fuck is going on in your head?” he asked while he wasn’t looking, as if that would make the question less vulnerable.

The Akatsuki had indeed been a sinking ship.

In theory, Kakuzu could understand not getting to know one another. It made it easier if something happened to someone – no attachment meant no mourning. No slowing down to cry over someone else. No connections meant it was easier to switch parts around, put different teams together. In theory, it worked.

In reality, it forced different mindsets into conflict. Kakuzu had never liked working with Zetsu. Itachi and Orochimaru were a bad mixture. Kisame had once almost taken Sasori’s head off because of an unwelcome comment by the puppeteer. Hidan and Deidara had always seemed to be competing for who was more on-edge about what they believed in. Their organization was an explosion waiting to happen. Nothing good came of them working together, even if some of their ambitions had actually played out.

“I am remembering some things,” Kakuzu finally settled on answering the other immortal with. He clenched his hand tighter on the strap of his bag.

_(His brother would be ashamed of him, these days.)_

Gritting his teeth, Kakuzu forced himself to keep moving. Hidan kept pace at his side, the shirt closed up over his chest. They would definitely need to stop to buy him a warmer covering than that – depending on the other, Kakuzu had plans to visit some of the colder climates. He had always expressed a distaste for them, he would have to count on Pein and Konan remembering that.

He had come from a water-filled land.

Ice would have to do.

Hyougagakure.

When he said the name to Hidan, he got to watch as his nose wrinkled, his mouth twisting into a frown. “Really?” He rubbed at his arms for a moment, shivering, before he sighed. “Yeah, no, you’re probably fucking right.” He pulled his scythe off his back, hefting the weight of it in his hands before nodding. “We need to stop for a second.”

Kakuzu did, watching as Hidan sat down with his weapon.

With an even deeper sigh, Hidan began tugging at the back of one of the blades, grunting quietly until it popped out. He unscrewed it slowly, muttering to himself the entire time. “I got so used to working with the three blades,” he spoke up again. “But it’s probably better to switch them around while we’re out here – less chance of getting caught.”

He moved to the second largest blade, repeating the process.

“You have been able to do this?” Kakuzu tilted his head, taking in the new information. Hidan had always fought with the three blades out, glinting a bloodied red. Battles were even bloodier, gore spattered across the landscape as the Jashinist fought. “For how long?”

“Since I got it,” Hidan waved him away and Kakuzu felt something like confusion rising inside of him. Curiosity. A willingness to understand, to learn. Hidan was still something of a mystery to him.

As he was to Hidan.

Sealing the removed blades away in a scroll, Hidan stood up, giving his scythe a few practice swings.

“It will not help much,” Kakuzu watched as he moved. “But it could be the difference between being caught by recognition and escaping with our persons intact.”

“Yeah,” Hidan grinned.

With that expression, Kakuzu felt like he understood just a little more about him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish I had a better endnote for this chapter other than my brain hates me and I managed to escape.
> 
> I got out. The tiny little town is in my rearview and I am Okay. Current events have me unhappy, but I'm alive. I can work with that.
> 
> Anyways. Enjoy Kakuzu being confused and conflicted and unsure of what to do.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, look! It's the rest of the Akatsuki! 
> 
> I've mentioned the purges of the weak links, before. Kisame thought about them in an earlier chapter. This is what happens.


End file.
